Coming to the end of my university career, I can say that I have sadly not had many ground-breaking teachers in college. Of course, the majority of the ones I have had are brilliant in their fields—I go to a top-tier school that provides me with that as a part of my tuition—and are extremely passionate about the subjects they are talking about, but I don’t think that makes a great teacher.
In a conversation with a friend recently, we narrowed down a list of criteria that, to us, was what we had found had made the teachers we had been privileged to learn from the best teachers we had had. In my mind, it was the following:
Knowledge of the subject matter
It goes without saying that a great teacher knows the subject matter well. After all, it’s hard to imagine a teacher with any credibility who stumbles to teach the material. However, this goes beyond what is in the book. The teachers responsible for my education that really stood out for me personally were the ones who engaged me above the syllabus. In high school, my physics teacher led us in a conversation about the Chandrasekhar Limit, my economics professor asked us to evaluate the problems with agriculture in the EU and my mathematics professor detailed the concept of infinity to us in a very interesting way.
Anyone could have taught me about demand elasticity, but to do that and engage me intellectually in a real world application to how supply and demand elasticity and time affect a commodity market was just one example of how grateful I am to him. I think the issue with learning the more traditionally academic subjects in high school (mathematics, science and economics) is that you have to start off at such a fundamental level; with the notable exception of physics1, college level mathematics2 and economics did not seem to be of tremendous practical use.
Passion
I think it follows strongly from my previous point that a teacher with no passion for his subject as well as a passion for teaching itself is going to struggle with maintaining the respect and attention of his or her students. I’d say that this is the biggest shortcoming of most of the college professors I have had. I get the feeling that they are teaching because they have to, not because they want to. Learning how to calculate the competitive equilibrium of a system should be a fantastic thing—the concept is not only important but the ideas behind are brilliant—but become the usual tedium of copying down examples and key points from lecture slides.
A passionate teacher is able to engage his or her students with the same love and appreciation of the subject that they have. Speaking from personal experience, I enjoyed the subjects taught by passionate professors far more than those without. Much like the rest of these points, this fits in perfectly—a passionate teacher will know the material better. A passionate teacher is going to enjoy teaching his or her students, the material and will be much easier to learn the material from.
Humor
It seems like almost a no-brainer, but I think the importance of humor in the classroom is understated—particularly by those who haven’t sat in one in a long time. A small joke thrown in at the correct time not only maintains the attention of the students but keeps them interested through the more tedious parts of the syllabus. I think this takes talent; the ability to instinctively know when and what to say to cause a room full of people a generation away from you to laugh isn’t easy. After all, a teacher—with only a small stretch of the imagination—is a performer too.
I get the feeling traditional teaching methods try to place and emphasis on the divide between the teacher and the students; I personally think that leads to an estranged relationship between the two. The fun and humorous teachers were the ones that were closest to—they weren’t, though—what I would call a friend. While I don’t know if this was just a sampling of my high school, I think it helps if the age gap between the teachers and the students is smaller. After all, it makes sense to be able to connect with a teacher on a wide variety of age-specific topics. No one is going to laugh if your 50-year old biology professor makes a Mork and Mindy reference.
A non-gameable system
In the conversation that led to this post, my friend talked about a professor he took a class with that had a very strange3 system for encouraging students to take good lecture notes. At the start of every lecture, a sheet was handed out that had all the major topics of the day as headings. For a non-trivial portion of the total grade of the class, students had to take notes on the sheet and hand them in at the end of lecture to get graded. Abstracted away as it was in the conversation, it seemed totalitarian, but coupled with the rest of what makes a great teacher, my friend told me he actually loved that aspect of the class. He had great lecture notes, there was no incentive to miss lecture, and the professor was extremely engaging and passionate.
My high school economics professor had a system which he had used since he started teaching the subject: every year, he would start off by moving just a little faster than the syllabus required. He was observant enough to ensure that no student was falling behind, but by the end of the year, we’d have completed the material over a month ahead of time. The rest of the time was spent on practice. We do an in-class test for one class, then come in the next day and go over it. And so on, and so forth. What landed up happening was that almost everyone got a A; those who didn’t missed the mark by just a few points. Coupled with his ability to keep us entertained and never letting boredom settle in—yes, even during marco-economics—many students refereed to him as one of the best teachers in the school. And if their word didn’t mean much, then the grades should: he had one of the highest grade averages in the school in a traditionally challenging subject.
We called this system that these teachers set up a ‘non-gameable system’. It was a system that ensured students couldn’t get away without learning. Note this is very different to a system that prevents gaming in the form of cheating—while a non-gameable sytem might, as a byproduct, prevent cheating, it shouldn’t aim to. There are degrees to which a system like this works. For example, assigning weekly homework and giving a significant proportion of the grade should technically be non-gameable, but students will tend to work together or copy solutions and not learn. However, requiring a few paragraphs explaining the week’s readings at the end of the week should work well.
The quality and effectiveness of the system depends on the professor and his implementation of it. Someone who doesn’t match the other criteria I have prevent here will be—to me—extremely difficult to learn from. However, with two identical professors but for their choice of implementing a non-gameable system, I would choose the one who does every time.
What does this mean?
While this seems to be a blueprint of what makes a perfect teacher, I prefer to think of it more as what made my most impressive teachers such great educators in every aspect. I am confident that many people are going to disagree with this in some way, whether it may be by seeing this analysis as too strong or too weak, or just irrelevant. To those people I ask that you let me know what you think. In fact, email me if you have any thoughts on this matter at all—after all (if I may slip into my philosopher shoes), if our future generations are the ones that will walk our shoes better than we did, are teachers not the ones that point out the paths4?